The film is dense, both in plot and subject matter, but most of the time it doesn't matter. A money manager based on Steve Eisman, played with prickly edge by Steve Carell, follows suit, as does Ben Rickert, a composite character underplayed by a heavily bearded Brad Pitt. (It's been reported that Bale wore Burry's actual t-shirts in the film.) Saddled with a glass eye and a predilection for blaring metal while calculating figures, Burry sets the film's action in motion, sending out a chain reaction as he persuades banks to sell him millions of dollars in credit default swaps. As usual, Bale sinks himself so far into the role it's hard to see where the character ends and the actor begins. Michael Burry, a former neurologist who created hedge fund Scion Capital and was one of the first to predict the impending subprime mortgage collapse. And you're rooting for them the entire time.Ĭhristian Bale is the film's standout as Dr. For better or morally worse, these people bet against market for their own gain. Your understanding of the financial issues is secondary to the movie's plot, which follows characters based on the real-life people who predicted that the housing bubble would burst long before it happened. Then, enlist filmmaker Adam McKay-he of Funny Or Die and Anchorman fame-to direct the film adaptation, released today nationwide.

43-44.How do you enliven what should be an impenetrable topic like America's 2007 financial crisis, spawned by the bursting of the housing bubble and centered around concepts like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligation? For one, put incredibly talented journalist Michael Lewis on it-his 2010 book, The Big Short, gave us non-MBAs a rudimentary understanding of the complex issues at play. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. The industry rushed to come up with something less dangerous than radial keratomy, and Lasik was eventually born.'' 'In reality,' says Burry, 'the incentive was to maintain their high, often one- to two-million dollar incomes, and the justification followed. The inadequately studied procedure was marketed as a cure for the suffering of contact lens wearers. Across America, ophthalmologists rediscovered an obscure and risky procedure called radial keratotomy, and there was a boom in surgery to correct small impairments of vision. In the late 1990s, Medicare slashed reimbursement levels to around $450 per procedure, and the incomes of the surgically minded ophthalmologists fell. They'd take half an hour or less, and yet Medicare would reimburse them $1,700 a pop. In the 1990s, the ophthalmologists were building careers on performing cataract procedures. The evolution of eye surgery was another great example. In hospitals in which the reimbursement rates for appendectomies ran higher, for instance, the surgeons removed more appendixes. 'Even in life or death situations, doctors, nurses, and patients all responded to bad incentives.

The big short by michael lewis